One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025)

[hearthesilence]

They don't seem to allow discounted pricing at the Regal for the Vista screening, but given how much damage is quickly accruing on the print, I hope that changes.

[beamish14]

They don't seem to allow discounted pricing at the Regal for the Vista screening, but given how much damage is quickly accruing on the print, I hope that changes.

I remember something similar happening on the initial release of The Hateful Eight, when one of the 70mm prints ended up getting completely sliced on a platter

I’m just surprised that the Los Feliz Vista has a DCP projector. Tarantino famously threw the New Beverly’s off their roof when he took over, much to the immense anger of Michael Torgan (its founder)’s son, who still works there

[GaryC]

They don't seem to allow discounted pricing at the Regal for the Vista screening, but given how much damage is quickly accruing on the print, I hope that changes.

I remember something similar happening on the initial release of The Hateful Eight, when one of the 70mm prints ended up getting completely sliced on a platter

The Odeon Leicester Square had a 4K DCP as a back-up when it showed The Hateful Eight in 70mm. Fortunately it wasn't needed when I saw the film there.

Also fortunately, I saw The Master in 70mm in the then Odeon West End before one reel was scratched.

Presumably the New Beverley doesn't show ads and only 35mm trailers? I'm due to see One Battle After Another at the Odeon in VistaVision, and I'm in no doubt that ads, trailers and likely the BBFC certificate will be projected digitally even if the film isn't.

[beamish14]

They don't seem to allow discounted pricing at the Regal for the Vista screening, but given how much damage is quickly accruing on the print, I hope that changes.

I remember something similar happening on the initial release of The Hateful Eight, when one of the 70mm prints ended up getting completely sliced on a platter

The Odeon Leicester Square had a 4K DCP as a back-up when it showed The Hateful Eight in 70mm. Fortunately it wasn't needed when I saw the film there.

Also fortunately, I saw The Master in 70mm in the then Odeon West End before one reel was scratched.

Presumably the New Beverley doesn't show ads and only 35mm trailers? I'm due to see One Battle After Another at the Odeon in VistaVision, and I'm in no doubt that ads, trailers and likely the BBFC certificate will be projected digitally even if the film isn't.

The New Beverly pre-shows include vintage ads, thematic trailers, and a short subject (usually an animated film, but sometimes a newsreel or travelogue)

[mfunk9786]

Speaking of Penn, I haven’t seen it mentioned anywhere, but his performance is basically

Spoiler

evil Popeye, right? He has a similar mug, body type, and even walks like him.

I saw him as having a lot of RFK Jr in his characterization.

[bearcuborg]

What came to mind for me, was that Sean Penn probably had a blast reading the script.

I remember someone here saying that they couldn't imagine any forum member not buying the Bergman boxset when it was announced. After I saw One Battle After Another, I felt that it would be impossible for anyone here not enjoying at least some part of this movie; it really has something for everyone. And to release this kind of movie, in 2025 and for it to be so glib - Anderson uses humor to hold the film together. Even though the Tom Cruise joke is in the trailer, I still laughed when it comes up in the movie. Though I can't imagine Leo did his own stunt... By the way, Tony Goldwyn does not age.

Like others have said, I definitely saw a Terminator 2 influence. Certainly Dr. Strangelove. The desert stuff reminded me of The Hitcher. And maybe because I just watched it on 4k the other day, I saw a bit of The Trouble with Harry - for the dark humor, incredible score and yes - VistaVision. Seeing this at the Regal in Union Square was immersive beyond expectations.

I usually fall for the modern masterpiece hype, only to be disappointed - but for me, this time it fits. OBAA is distinctly Paul Thomas Anderson, but yet universally master filmmaking. I don't usually follow box office news - but I feel like this movie could have been Fight Club big had it come out during the Bush administration. Unlike in the movie, quite a bit has changed - at least how we see movies. Also, are these two movies the quintessential gen x movies of the 2000s? If word of mouth helps people see this any way possible - great - but damn, this is a movie to be experienced in a theater if there ever was one... I'm seeing it in IMAX 70mm next in Indianapolis. I guess it really is one battle after another...

[Drucker]

Saw it last night in Regal. Perfect crowd. No phones, lots of laughter all over the place. Also a fully packed house.

Spoiler

I loved this film. It really did have it all. Certainly not my favorite PTA, but it really quite beautifully does all the things he's great at. Sure there are some big time action sequences, but at its core the film is another entry where PTA is spotlighting someone really looking for a purpose and connections. Bob, like many of the characters in Inherent Vice, is looking for connections and purpose. At the film's core is this performance of a man that mostly lacks direction, except the singular focus of trying to keep his family together and protect them. Juxtapose his ability to remember revolutionary passwords with his dedication to his daughter.

Of course along the way there are great scenes and lots of hijinx. His escape from the house through the tunnel is a great set-piece. The way they move around Sensei's hideout had all the makings of the usual traveling camera shots we get in PTA films. Del Toro's performance would easily be the film's best if not for Penn's masterful turn. The other thing that really stuck out to me: there are two moments in this film, including the final car chase, which take place in near complete silence. Long stretches, especially for a modern (blockbuster!) go without dialogue. It's impressive the way PTA creates and maintains tension just by filming the action and letting the actors act.

It certainly doesn't reach the magical highs I think of when I think of PTA. The nude piano scene in The Master, the opening scene of Licorice Pizza and the maternal apparition of Phantom Thread register very highly for me. But I did love this film. And credit where it's due: it completely meets the political moment we find ourself in. He's made a timeless film set in the present day,

Spoiler

with cellphones and all.

[Monterey Jack]

By the way, Tony Goldwyn does not age.

Dude's sixty-five and still looks like a well-preserved forty-five.

[Red Screamer]

Even moreso than a unique masterpiece like Inherent Vice, Pynchon probably loves that his work was adapted into a rip-roaring Hollywood star-vehicle like this. I see it as weird marriage between Sam Fuller agitprop and 90s action fantasy which with the source material, to indulge in cliché, looks disconcertingly like realism in 2025. As someone who thinks Anderson’s last three are his best and when he truly found his voice as a filmmaker, I’m with Never Cursed that it’s a little disappointing to see him step away from the tonally ambiguous, tender long-take style he’d been developing. But pulling this clashing, aggressively frontal project into a sculpted and exciting crowd pleaser is no small feat. He was already our last great mainstream-adjacent US filmmaker, but seeing him try totally different things in his last five films is its own exhilaration.

And in any case the chops are still there: the stretch from the high school dance to DiCaprio’s arrest, for example, is electrifying filmmaking, with a handheld camera whirling around apartments and shops as he goofily pops in and out of the frame in a half-dozen different ways while a level-headed Del Toro simultaneously organizes a mass evacuation in the face of an impending ICE raid. The movie’s usual montage-heavy style, with lots of crosscut scenes, comes together here in a long stretch of great simultaneous staging.

That scene also has a glimpse of the movie’s political heart, since DiCaprio continuously thinks all the panic is about him, seeming not to realize that there are a few dozen people with him also risking arrest for a different reason. There’s a poignant parallel in the second to last scene where:

Spoiler

He builds up giving his daughter a letter from her estranged mother as a big reveal, not realizing that she is the one who actually holds the secret that would change everything: that she’s not his biological daughter. She’s really the one protecting him.

This is also of DiCaprio’s best and least distanced performances, with makeup & mannerisms that play up his faded boyishness whereas some of his other more recent roles have tried to hide it under a slightly grizzled look.

I shelled out money to see it a second time on VistaVision and the narrower framing is clearly the right one. There are certain specific compositional effects of symmetry or surprise that are all but ruined in the wider version (I saw the 1.85:1 last time) and in general, the visual style looks a little lax and empty with wider framing whereas in the 1.50:1 the dead-center compositions and close-ups are nicely emphatic. The DCP is also significantly brighter and a bit more desaturated, while the film print had satisfying deep blacks and popping reds/blues (an assassin’s preppy red Lacoste polo sears the eyes in the climax like pop art iconography). The shot of Willa leaving the dance, for example, seemed timed to look like dim evening sun, whereas in the DCP it looked (distractingly) like bright, early afternoon. The sound mix was also better with the loudness Never Cursed mentioned / that we all remember from the blasts of the Phantom Thread score. TLDR; my armchair opinion is that the widescreen is an exhibition byproduct and if Anderson cares about video, we’ll have the narrower one on disc.

[feihong]

A week and a half after seeing this movie I am finally ready to come to terms with how strange and frustrating the experience was. Frustrating, because as I watched I felt so gratified to be seeing a movie that felt interesting and substantial, so glad to see a movie made with a really personal style, that I struggled to ignore the undertow I felt as the movie went on, the feeling the film in fact seemed to be what Briahna Joy Gray called it in a recent discussion I heard with Van Lathan––a counterrevolutionary psy-op. I didn't have those words for it at the time, but something definitely felt wrong to me, something itching at the back of my scalp. I could feel that twinge grow stronger over the last week, as I listened to a number of black leftist critics talk about the picture's problematic takes on black women revolutionaries. That isn't quite the landscape from which I can confidently criticize the film, but for me the questions I have and the problems I see coming out of One Battle After Another stem from a nagging question I could never get a sufficient answer to over the course of the picture: What do the French 75 actually believe in?

Who knows how much Warner Bros might have weighed in on this topic, or how much PTA might have censored himself in the course of making the movie. Who knows how much this omission was a deliberate artistic or storytelling choice? The film is framed and edited in a way so ruthless as to cut out many key things we might actually want to see, which PTA regards, in a Kurosawa-like, furious rigor, as beside the point––like the spectacle of whatever fireworks or mortars Ghetto Pat rigs to explode in the opening scene, for instance, or Lockjaw's capture of Perfidia at the courthouse, or why Sergio might trust Pat/Bob enough to go to the mattresses for him when he has so much else to lose, or maybe the one extra thing I needed to convince me that the bounty hunter was actually okay with suddenly laying down his own life to save Willa (Was he getting divorced? Dying of a disease? Was business drying up? I felt something more was needed––that scene was so weirdly choreographed I had a lot of trouble accepting it––why wouldn't he try and make an excuse for his coming back, why wouldn't he kill the guard first and give himself a fighting chance of escaping too, why wouldn't he try and grab any cover when he was shooting into the guardroom? Why the sudden suicide mission? Hard to accept.) But it's quite striking that, in a nearly three-hour film about a revolutionary cell, we never hear any of its members discuss, you know, revolutionary theory or praxis? Any tenants of the world they want to see, any picture of their own role in the struggle? Any clear sense of what they are trying to achieve?

There are clues––there are little easter eggs we can follow, like the way Bob is watching The Battle of Algiers on television while Willa is out at the mall or wherever. There's the marijuana the nuns grow. There are some contextual clues, too. We know the group is against the jailing of immigrants, or, at least, we might assume that based on the film's attempts to be current with some of the more overt political distresses shown in the picture. We know they're anti-cop, but that should go without saying. We know the group is connected to the later movement Sergio is a part of––at least in the sense that Sergio seems legitimately wowed by Bob's involvement in the French 75, enough so that he's willing to put at risk his own much more tangible anti-authoritarian actions so he can play revolutionary with a member of the ol' French 75. And the actions of the group are meant to resemble those of the Weather Underground and especially, I think, the Symbionese Liberation Army, in the killing of bank guards and the emphasis on interracial relations. But the only slightly revolutionary things I hear any members of the group say in the picture have to do with interracial f*cking. Not even interracial love, though that seems to be folded into the package (none of the revolutionaries talk about love except for Bob––the rest are big into p*ssy and possessing it as I guess an alternative) by implication. I'm not saying interracial sex and romance is without its share of complications which could benefit from the support of the revolution, but as a tenant of a revolutionary manifesto it feels particularly 60s-era as a concern. We don't hear the black or latinx members of French 75 talk about systematic oppression, we don't hear Ghetto Pat the Irish bomb-maker ever ruminate on, I don't know, class war or imperialism or anything. The bottom line for me is that it's patently implausible that the French 75 never discuss Marxism, never discuss 3rd-world politics, never have political incidents they are responding to in any of their revolutionary actions. It's implausible they seem so disconnected from the rest of the world––not only Ghetto Pat in hiding as Bob is out of the loop, but the nuns are just as isolated and seemingly uninformed by the nature of their struggle. They're obviously a left-wing organization rather than a right-wing one, but you can't hold a house party for activists without a whole lot of talking politics, and I don't see how revolutionaries of any kind aren't doing at least that. it feels very inauthentic that they don't.

Moreover, the experience of being in French 75 is treated by the film as a mark of honor for Bob, as an inspiration for Sergio and for Bob's daughter...and yet, it seems to hardly impact Bob's life once he's on the run. This guy watches TV all the time, gets bombarded by capitalism, and apparently has nothing to say about it. The Battle of Algiers plays on TV, he has nothing to say about that, either. Did he put it on? It seems as if he must have, I doubt the film plays on TV too often. This must be the only stoned drunk in America who doesn't talk to the TV when he's alone, or for an audience like his daughter, for that matter. But we do get a little bit of ideology from the Christmas Adventurers, the Bohemian-Grove-like organization of conservative, racist power-players Lockjaw is looking to join. We learn they hate "race-mixing," that they want to protect their money, power and privilege by coating it in an ideology of "purity." That racist, classist viewpoint, straight out of Birth of a Nation, is apparently okay to put on screen––and that makes it doubly conspicuous that the French 75's ideology is so sotto-voce you might strain to hear and still end up unable to map it out at all.

Or you might just not be able to tell what kind of specific beliefs animate the French 75 revolutionaries. I always push my writing students to be more specific about what their characters believe––especially when they build worlds where different ideological viewpoints confer differing amounts of power and permission. In One Battle After Another I keep seeing places where more clarity about who the French 75 are in the context of their world would solve other significant problems the film has. The film's honestly surprising racism towards the black characters who take the lead in the French 75––Perfidia and Junglepussy and Laredo––stems from the way their characters are structured entirely around notions of sexual expression, sexual possession. When Junglepussy gets up on the counter in the bank robbery and starts talking a very vague kind of racial/sexual provocation, it makes one wonder how frowned upon an interracial sexual appreciation is in the world of the film. Nothing she says is so shocking, honestly, and it would seem far more true to the spirit of most revolutionary organizations that when Junglepussy talks, she doesn't foreground her own sexuality and why you should all bear witness to it, but rather she would talk about the specific oppressions or governmental policies the group is trying to alert the public to and move society on. Why would she waste such a rare spotlight signifying? Laredo's only significant part in the film is to claim Mae West as his white girl––is this really a radical group, really? With only this ideology of interracial lovemaking, they seem completely out of place in the 90s (actually, this kind of radical militant activism seems wholly out-of-place in the 90s context, period). If this is the only tenant of their platform, they don't need to die or go to jail for it in the time and place they allegedly exist. The handling of these characters in narrowly sexual terms––Perfidia and Junglepussy especially, since they have the most screentime of the group and spend almost all of it talking about their p*ssies––combined with the narrow scope of their roles in the plot––have resulted in what a lot of people––myself included––feel is a real character assassination of the black woman revolutionary's motivations and mindset in real life. A lot of discussions of this revolve around the legacy of the recently-departed Assata Shakur, whose revolutionary example is contradistinct with Perfidia's own in every possible way, even as some elements of Perfidia's plot and identity seem to have been loosely interpolated from Shakur's own story (for example, Assata Shakur didn't rat out her comrades the way Perfidia and every other radical in this movie seems to do––is this some sort of statement on PTA's part, that flies in the face of real-world examples? Everybody does not rat). Shakur's expansive thinking on the purposes of her revolutionary struggle are totally absent Perfidia's representation in the film, leaving us only with a collection of what Perfidia herself believes to be mistakes in her letter at the end of the film. PTA clearly wants the value of Perfidia's character to be an 11th-hour reveal in the course of the film...Should Willa be inspired by her mother's revolutionary example? Ultimately, Willa is inspired by it, but why and how is treated as a veeeeery vague part of this film. I guess we can't know what was in Perfidia's heart until the end. But as it is, she appears to be a sex-obsessed chaos agent, what Waving the Red Flag jokingly calls a "Mammie pixie dream girl," who disappears from the film without us ever knowing what she stood for, what was so worth believing in and working towards that she was willing to become an outlaw. It is weirdly impossible, it seems, in the context of her everyday teenage life for Willa to get any sense of her parents' revolutionary politics––even though she, unlike us, actually lives in this world, and could look up the French 75 in a textbook, probably. In the film she seems not to know anything about her mother, in spite of Perfidia's Bernadine-Dorn-level profile amongst the film's revolutionary left. And why does Sergio jump to help Bob when Bob very carelessly blurts out to him that he's a wanted radical? The film never really makes clear why Sergio is doing all this for Bob. One thing the film is VERY clear about is that Sergio is putting his whole network at risk by helping Bob. So why is he doing it? We might assume that Sergio thinks of Bob as a member of the same struggle. But it's disconcerting that we see just not even an ounce of proof of that. When Bob finally sees the protests happening on the street, it's notable how removed he is from them, as if they're a tableau unfolding before his eyes. For some reason, PTA elects not to show them, either––though again, context would be appreciated. What is it that all of these counterculture figures are organizing, protesting or revolting against? It seems to be what's going on in the streets of the U.S. right now, but again, the lack of any specificity means we can't connect enough dots and identify the ideological sides clearly.

More than that, I think there's some deeper disquiet I felt at the scene where Bob is going over the rooftops, gazing like a spectator at the protest going on below. The look on Bob's face is one of shock. I don't think this scene is handled too well, pretty though the image is. It's hard to tell whether Bob is bugging his eyes out looking down at the street because a) he's afraid of heights, b) he's still high from the afternoon, c) he had no idea people were still doing protests in the streets, d) he's horrified by what he sees. What the image sets up clearly is Bob's alienation from the events below. He isn't a part of this protest, he doesn't even understand it. At the end of the film, Willa goes off to a protest, and Bob waves goodbye and looks back at the TV. He has completed his character transformation from Ghetto Pat the revolutionary to Bob Ferguson, the father. But there's no real reason he can't go out and join his daughter, if he believed in...any part of the cause still? According to Bob, Perfidia was a revolutionary hero––Bob knows this because he has this letter from Perfidia admitting to her daughter that the hardness of her heart in staying away masked her love for her daughter––in Bob's mind that makes her a hero––and now Willa can inherit her mother's revolutionary legacy. The film doesn't seem full of overt messages to me, but one clear one is this idea that the revolutionary spirit has to be passed down to another generation. Willa must take up her parents' legacy in a new context, but...what context? Again, the lack of specificity trips the story up. What is the cause that Willa actually inherits? What are the precepts her parents believed in that she also does? What animates their shared ideas for what has to change in their society? The film makes coy associations, but I don't see what is actually being inherited in terms of ideology. Rather, the only concrete thing I see Willa inheriting from her revolutionary parents is their "radical chic."

Honestly, there couldn't be a more Gen-X take on radicalism than what PTA presents here. Throughout the film, parenthood is a value which overtly trumps fighting to change the world for the better. This is the value the film celebrates in Bob and condemns in Perfidia throughout (her failure to be a mother is something Bob and other cast members criticize)––never in the narrative is it possible a character can be both a radical in some form and a parent, as Assata Shakur decided was utterly possible when one's radical convictions came from love in the first place. In this film, however, love gets revolutionaries caught, forces them to rat each other out, and ruins the fun, sexy times. Because the French 75 are radicals in will and deed but not necessarily in idea, PTA can set up love as a weakness the villains are relentlessly exploiting. Love never gives anyone, for instance, the strength to resist naming names in interrogation. Even though we know that happens in the real world all the time. Without ideology, without a belief of how the world needs to change backstopping them, the French 75 only appear to be playing at revolution, using it for Heath-Ledger-Joker-style "anarchy" and interracial sex that is apparently still strongly taboo in the world of the film. They have no revolutionary doctrine, they never offer any analysis of the world as it exists, no critique of the status quo––whatever it really is. Every sentiment you get from these revolutionaries is that they're tired, that they can't take this or that any more, that they need to f*ck, that f*cking and bombs go together like nothing else, that they're too stoned to remember anything, that one guy liking a particular race of p*ssy overrides any sense of revolutionary discipline and we suddenly don't need passwords to screen out cops and rats anymore. What remains of the French 75––only Bob Ferguson and a couple others by the end, it seems––hosts a revolutionary radio hour (cannily cut off by censorious PTA before the announcer has a chance to articulate any kind of position on anything), and lives in the faint afterglow of a romantic boomer past in a very special time (though in this film it's somehow the 90s, not the hotbed of left radicalism the 60s were to the novel). What they did seems kind of cool or dumb and pathetic, depending on your own personal take, oh open-minded viewer. When you take the political beliefs out of the equation, hm. Maybe then you can just see it whichever way you prefer? I guess?

I have heard the counterargument that PTA is somehow trying to say that violent revolution is the French 75's mistake, and that peaceful protest is the way someone will change the world eventually, at some point in the future, passing down this revolutionary spirit to their children––but only the spirit of the revolution, not the violence, I guess, of the revolution itself. The arc of history is long, but it bends toward progress, right? Sure. I have no problem with the film making this assertion, I suppose––but I don't see how that argument really changes my criticism. After all, protestors who use nonviolence as a revolutionary strategy still have an ideology, a program for change, still have allies (some of which often do not use nonviolent resistance as their strategy of change) with whom they share ideological concerns. By taking this important context out of the movie, PTA leaves us not with a group of revolutionaries, but with a group of revolutionary cosplayers. This is the Gen-Xer in PTA, embracing the "radical chic" instead of the actual revolution. This was a critique of the Weather Underground and the SLA as well, but that critique came most often from an assessment of their actions and the effectiveness of their strategies, for they certainly talked like radicals––and I would say it's hard to insist they didn't intend to be radicals, either. In the case of the French 75, robbed of any context beyond vague suggestion of the need for their struggle, we don't really feel like these are people who are selling their lives dearly in order to make the world a better place. When Perfidia asks if Ghetto Pat likes black girls, he says "of course I like black girls! That's why I'm here!" He's making bombs and becoming a fugitive to meet girls, I guess? Perfidia seems to be mostly sexual aroused by the idea of revolution. In the absence of any larger structure of beliefs about the world, in the absence of any clearly articulated outrage at injustice, all we get from the movie is that the French 75 have a bunch of personal, psychosexual reasons they want to blow sh*t up and rob banks and give the cops the finger. The omission of any revolutionary ideology is so very, very wrongheaded, depriving the film's nominal protagonists of absolutely necessary context by which we judge their contemporary opinions and actions. The line between the past events in the film's prologue and the current time is being portrayed as the sexual jealousy of Lockjaw, when in fact the real throughline is what Ghetto Pat believed to what Bob Ferguson now believes, what Willa believes about her mother back to who her mother really was. Rendered without context, that throughline is completely broken. Willa's belief in her mother doesn't connect to any belief she herself harbors––we don't know what Willa's political convictions are, really, how radical she feels she is. And Ghetto Pat's transformation into Bob Ferguson is slightly mysterious as well. Obviously Pat's convictions about parenthood trump his politics––but if that's true, there's a real inconsistency in the idea that Pat is so gung-ho about revolution that he makes the f*cking bombs for it, and then so without conviction for it during parenthood that he closes his eyes, smokes it up, and hopes things will turn out good (I find myself really curious how Bob makes a living, but he is protected by the white male protagonist magic from having to do any economics and make dollars and cents add up). I think we're meant to believe he is drowning grief at the loss of Perfidia, numbing the pain and all. But in fact Bob seems much more like a stoned, Gen X slacker, because we never know what, if anything, he really believes in.

I can't tell, either, how PTA feels about his own protagonists. As much as he makes the right-wing racists idiots and creeps, he does not use the radicals' beliefs to elevate them in our eyes, exactly––because their beliefs aren't included in the picture. Do these people really stand for anything noble? Hell if I know. It's so fascinating that the director inserts that title card from Battle of Algiers on the TV in front of Bob. What is PTA trying to say with that? Are the French 75 not real revolutionaries, by comparison to the FLN in that film? If this is a critique, one has to offer a critique of one's own; we know the ideology and the praxis of the freedom fighters of the FLN intimately over the course of Battle of Algiers. And it's worth pointing out that, in contradistinction to the message of revolution carrying on to another generation in PTA's film, the FLN members do not rely upon that vague promise in an unknowable future; they give their lives because the revolution has to happen now. The film makes no bones about the way the FLN's sacrifice plays a role in developing a revolutionary conscience in the Algerians, leading to the later successful uprising. Whereas, PTA seems blissfully unconcerned. The only value One Battle After Another celebrates is parenthood. The villains mostly kill each other, a father is reunited with his daughter, and all is right with the world. What were they trying to do the revolution for, again? Oh, that's right. They NEVER SAID. I guess it doesn't matter.

Maybe PTA doesn't believe his revolutionaries are noble. His fetishization of black women in the film certainly isn't a revolutionary stance to take. Why make the film about revolutionaries, then, if he has no interest in seeing them for who and what they are in a broader context? Take them out rather than defame them. He apparently changed so much about the source novel already, what would one more change do? But a more interesting challenge here is to think about what other perspectives the story could be told from, if not the stoner, failed ex-radical. How would this all have to have changed if it was Willa's story, for instance? What if she didn't exist just to motivate and ultimately gratify her father, but instead the film was about her role in the current political moment and her attempts to align her own identity with her parents' legacy of radicalism? Would PTA be able to get away with having no overt politics expressed verbally in the film, if Willa were the protagonist? I doubt it. At the distance of about 10 days, I find I've gone from being grateful the movie exists to outright hating it. Hating it for the way it discounts any possibility that radical thought as anything but a pose, anything more than a lifestyle choice in the American setting; for the way it's looking-away from ideology allows the film to be so very disturbingly reductive, so racist and sexist in its outlook. I guess I'm a little relieved its critique of radicalism is at the end of the day so completely insubstantial. This is ultimately a film made from a really infuriatingly privileged position, by a Gen-X succes d'estime, who can look at the history of radicalism in America, and at the desperation of the current moment, and imagine what if all that, but like a Looney Tunes, where they're being chased by fascist Popeye and they get into japes? Incidentally, I'm Gen X too; but my life experience has demanded I grow beyond slacker self-centeredness to inform my own politics, and I'm embarrassed by what seems to be PTA's reductive, dismissive take on Leftist political conviction here. This from the filmmaker so praised for exploring so many codified, hidden microcosms of society with an unprecedented lack of judgement. The porn performers of Boogie Nights got so much more credit in his estimation than one might feel they always deserved, more credit than the radicals get in One Battle After Another; but maybe that's the key. Anderson seems to like to question the validity of his characters' self-belief in his films. There is constant tension in Boogie Nights in how sincere Jack Horner is about his artistic ambitions, in whether Paul Sunday in There Will Be Blood is a fraud––he obviously likes the ambiguity of characters' self-identity, and maybe he's doing that here, too. But I think having a political ideology outside of establishment politics actually requires more belief, more certainty, than PTA is willing to credit anyone with. People have to be driven by these psychosexual, Freudian impulses, desires for dominance, love of chaos a deep psychological damage that demands violent release––he seems unable to accept or comprehend a perspective motivated by, for instance, the noblest, best feelings some of us harbor for others, unwilling to try and deal with how a violent power structure really relates to challenging ideologies. And the message of the film seems to me that radicalism is a cool attitude you pass down to your kids, and that radical change today is social and sexual in nature more than it is structural inequality, neocolonialism, or anything. Even if the filmmakers are that reductively neoliberal in their intentions, at least I could analyze it and argue about it more coherently if only the French 75 had some coherent philosophy or radical tradition they were clearly, cogently situated within. In the end, what's most distressing to me is that there is this gaping hole where that greater contextualization of these characters should be. It makes the movie feel much less substantial to me, less credible, and especially in the sequences with Perfidia and Junglepussy and the others, really problematic. And the general air of the movie makes it feel exceptionally wrongheaded for the current moment, where I don't think that the positions the French 75 would probably really support can't be considered just a fetish or a pose, or something to be pawned off on some later generation.

[Red Screamer]

This won’t go entirely against what you’re saying since your argument is more with the kind of movie/portrait it is in the first place, but I noticed some slight nuances here. Taylor specifically says on the phone that they’re bombing a courthouse to stop an abortion ban, implying they’ve previously tried to stop it by other means, though perhaps those other means were just threats. Their repeated rallying cry “free bodies” connects that value to their pro-immigration / anti-ICE focus which is mainly what we see depicted in the movie. Later on, the protests in the street (unconnected to the French 75) are against the ICE invasion of the town, which Penn helped call for and which he’s using to cover up his personal mission, but which are also just “normal” ICE raids terrorizing the community. Del Toro is caught in between the two because there’s a raid happening on his friend’s shop / his apartment building unrelated to DiCaprio, but then he’s put himself in additional heat by helping him. I personally thought it was a nice touch that Del Toro was a “no questions asked” kind of guy and that he would have helped out DiCaprio whether he was a known revolutionary or just a regular dad (which, as you say, is mostly what he is after the time jump, identifying almost too much with his alter ego). The movie’s assertion that ICE’s goals line up with those of white supremacists and that them and the police often just make up reasons to raid towns, arrest people, fire at protestors, etc. was probably the main political novelty in a Hollywood movie for me. The ratting is an interesting question I don’t quite get either, though

Spoiler

doesn’t Regina Hall break the cycle at the end of the film?

[DeprongMori]

I just composed a very thoughtful and lengthy response, which the forum software just prohibited me from posting and then lost.

[Altair]

I wasn't even a particular fan of One Battle After Another - better than Licorice Pizza, but a real step down from Anderson's character focused films like Phantom Thread or The Master. It's best moments are as a comedy or as a thriller; it seems telling that Del Toro gave, for me, the most compelling performance, and he was just giving us his usual low-key charisma (always a pleasure but hardly a stretch for him).

That being said, I think a lot of feihong's critiques of the film's politics seem to come from expecting a very different film. One Battle After Another's politics are broad-brush and very clear: pro-immigration, pro-people of colour, and a critique of ICE, deportations, and far-right wealthy white supremacists. It's not complex, but it's pretty clear what Anderson is endorsing (and criticising). It is also a very broad, often comedic film that is not aiming to be a cinéma verité work, like The Battle of Algiers. Imagine if Sean Penn's character had been as pragmatic and as charismatic as Jean Martin as Colonel Mathieu in Pontecorvo's film - people's reactions would be much more askance. This is not meant to be a politically subtle film in that sense.

I would also say you're ignoring the formal and political context of the film: you want the revolutionaries to sit down and discuss their politics, à la a Godard film. But this isn't a Godard film: it's a Leonardo DiCaprio film, financed by Warner Bros! It's a studio film, not an avant-garde political film: hence the emphasis on family and the father-daughter relationship. Emotion transcends politics in studio cinema. The fact that Warners spent somewhere in the region of $175 million on a film with such a pro-immigration narrative background (and it is very much part of the background, rather than a main focus of the narrative) is the most surprising thing about the film's politics. I don't think we need to imagine Anderson censored himself - what indication is there in his previous films that he has a far-left, revolutionary politics?

[DeprongMori]

I hope to hell this highly truncated and badly compromised attempt to recompose my previous carefully composed — and lost — response doesn’t also get eaten. I may edit and expand it later rather than attempt to capture it in first go.

RE: PTA’s depiction of the French 75 and politics

Contra Feihong, I believe PTA is very clear in his depiction and position on both.

PTA’s opening scene in the French 75’s liberation of the immigrant detention camp does several things — it engages the audience in a thrilling set-piece, and it introduces us to the main characters, their methods, their milieu, and their functional antagonists. As it seems to be an effectively executed plan in a good cause, that is also effective in its outcome, it gets the audience on their side.

However, in subsequent scenes in the prologue it becomes clear that the French 75 are insular, vanguardist, not connected to their communities, and not particularly effective. All of their other operations that blow up banks or offices or transmission towers to take out power to the city are never shown to have actually accomplished anything. It becomes increasingly obvious, that ideals aside, the French 75 are primarily thrill-seekers.

What are their ideals? As expressed in one of their phone calls, something like “freedom in one’s body, freedom from borders, and freedom from fear”. Their enemy is oppression and fascism. I contend it is not necessary to spend much time on conversations about revolutionary theory and so forth in the film because ultimately it is irrelevant to the themes of isolation and community.

With the arrival of baby Charlene (later “Willa”), Perfidia (the runner) and Pat (the stump) have opportunity to reevaluate their relationship to the world. They both revert to their natures. In his exile after the group has been compromised, Pat (now “Bob”) tries to be a good parent but he is utterly unmoored from the larger world and descends into a deep fog of booze and weed, indulging in masturbatory fantasies of a self-image as one-time effective revolutionary through repeated viewings of “The Battle of Algiers”. He is a loving but paranoid and ineffectual dad with no community and no larger purpose. (He later confesses to having fried his brains on drugs and booze for thirty years — far longer than his 16 years in exile.)

As a teen, Willa is learning the centered discipline of karate, connection to breath, and a sense of being an ocean rather than an atom. When Bob takes refuge with her sensei, Sergio St. Carlos, in his panic to find the missing Willa he is oblivious to everything going on around him that demonstrates that Sergio is a highly effective resistance organizer who has woven a huge community-based underground railroad operation, that extends even into the local hospital personnel and the greater community of Baktan Cross and far beyond. (What is a “sanctuary city” but a whole community’s embrace of ideals? What is an “underground railroad” but a set of trusted nodes in a much larger network of trust?) Former French 75 member Bob Sommerville in his exile had turned from “revolutionary” to “community organizer” tied into the same subrosa network as Sensei. When Sommerville is captured, the children of his neighborhood (apparently not in Baktan Cross) send out the signal for “Operation Snap Crackle Pop” to begin.

This new “Operation Snap Crackle Pop” of the Baktan Cross network is not the empty, self-congratulatory fireworks of the opening scene, but rather the community creating sufficient diversion in the streets during the fed raid on the city for Sensei to be able to safely evacuate his “passengers”. I believe that what causes Bob to become slack-jawed in astonishment as he races across the rooftops is that he sees an entire community coming together effectively in common purpose to revolutionary ends, in contrast to the French 75’s insular and narcissistic thrill-seeking actions. It is an organic resistance.

By the final scene, Bob has regained a sense of direction and purpose in the world, has understood and accepted his failures as a “revolutionary”, and can engage more healthily as a parent and as someone committed to action in support of ideals. Willa has seen firsthand the nature of the enemy and what is at stake, which she had previously dismissed as the paranoid rantings of her dad. She is grounded in herself and in larger community, so when she gets a call for rapid response in Oakland, she can go forth in power and confidence, with the faith and trust (and parental worry) of Bob. The resistance against fascism is in good hands with the next generation.

[swo17]

I just composed a very thoughtful and lengthy response, which the forum software just prohibited me from posting and then lost.

Sorry about that. I would recommend writing lengthy posts elsewhere and then copying them into a post here once completed

[Mr Sausage]

I just composed a very thoughtful and lengthy response, which the forum software just prohibited me from posting and then lost.

Sorry about that. I would recommend writing lengthy posts elsewhere and then copying them into a post here once completed

Or Copying the text before hitting ‘submit’, which I do.

I also sent this as a PM, but the forum software does save unsubmitted posts in draft, which’ll either load automatically the next time you open the full post editor, or you can load manually by clicking ‘load saved draft’ at the bottom near the submit button.

[DeprongMori]

I just composed a very thoughtful and lengthy response, which the forum software just prohibited me from posting and then lost.

Sorry about that. I would recommend writing lengthy posts elsewhere and then copying them into a post here once completed

Or Copying the text before hitting ‘submit’, which I do.

I also sent this as a PM, but the forum software does save unsubmitted posts in draft, which’ll either load automatically the next time you open the full post editor, or you can load manually by clicking ‘load saved draft’ at the bottom near the submit button.

I usually write short posts rather than lengthy compositions, so hadn’t previously encountered problems. I was lulled into a false sense of security this time seeing the “Auto draft saved!” every few sentences, and when I went to recover from draft after error there was no draft there. The paranoid second time around, I did a “save quick draft” after every new sentence, then saved it to an external location before I hit “post”. Belt and suspenders.

I wish I had captured the error message. It was something like “your submission has been prohibited by (Cloudflare?) because <reasons>”

[hearthesilence]

FWIW, I too have lost many a post for similar reasons. I usually just give up and not post (especially if I was doing it on a phone), but yeah, if you know it's going to be a long one, best to do it elsewhere like your email app, then copy and paste it in.

[feihong]

That being said, I think a lot of feihong's critiques of the film's politics seem to come from expecting a very different film. One Battle After Another's politics are broad-brush and very clear: pro-immigration, pro-people of colour, and a critique of ICE, deportations, and far-right wealthy white supremacists. It's not complex, but it's pretty clear what Anderson is endorsing (and criticising). It is also a very broad, often comedic film that is not aiming to be a cinéma verité work, like The Battle of Algiers. Imagine if Sean Penn's character had been as pragmatic and as charismatic as Jean Martin as Colonel Mathieu in Pontecorvo's film - people's reactions would be much more askance. This is not meant to be a politically subtle film in that sense.

Because the politics Anderson attaches to the French 75 in little snippets throughout the film are as broad-brush as they are, it means that the politics of French 75 are not satisfactorily explicit to make their identities as leftist radicals believable or at all sympathetic. All those positions you stated are positions espoused by most democrats in America today, from centrists to New Deal liberals––but none of these positions are exclusively left-wing, in the progressive-to-socialist-to-communist-to-anarchist space where the French 75 would, historically, be situated. Nothing in the film nails down that the French 75 believe the things that revolutionary leftists in the United States have generally believed. That element of the group's unifying structure, where they view America as an imperialist project, where they view state violence in America as a symptom of a violent, imperialist project, is never articulated in the film––there is nothing close to that kind of articulation going on. And what I'm trying to say is that the result of playing coy with who and what the French 75 really are means that the film ends up undermining it's revolutionaries, making them seem superficial; people who have glommed together not because of shared beliefs outside the politics of the major American political parties and their attendant political philosophies, but because they want to screw each other and get wild. Because their violence is denied an clear explanation of revolutionary strategy, the film ends up presenting them simply as domestic terrorists, whose cause is a pose, "revolutionary chic" in place of revolutionary conviction. DJ BenHaMeen said it quite simply in a recent podcast when he said it made revolution look foolish. This isn't me expecting a different film; this is me asking that the movie put some credence behind the purpose it purports to espouse; if the revolutionaries are your main characters, if you think their cause is at all meaningful, do you, as a filmmaker, have any responsibility to learn a little bit about what they would actually be like? Because in these early scenes PTA is mostly just writing them the same way you might write a sex cult. And if that is his attitude towards the French 75, it is a disappointing one. Fred Hampton offered scathing criticism of the Weathermen back in the day, but his critique was being offered at least in part as one the Weathermen could take on and learn from. I don't see PTA really analyzing or understanding the French 75 as representative of the milieu which their model was drawn from. It seems like a centrist democrat's view of revolution: sexy and exciting, perhaps, but going too far. And if that's the position of the filmmaker, it's disappointing. I was trying to allow for the idea that the film might have stronger leftist credentials, which were sanded away in the editing, but I don't think that's the case. It seems more likely that Anderson understands the revolutionaries from that centrist lens.

Let's say for a second PTA's goal was to render the leftist revolutionaries as they might see themselves, or at the very least, show some semblance of how they justify their own actions in their minds––the kind of thing we call character development and mis en scene, not something exclusively in the didactic mode of Godard, but the kind of thing we can pick up through contextual clues. There is very little revolutionary theory presented in The Battle of Algiers, but the film manages convey the need for revolution and the attitudes of the anti-colonial revolutionaries very clearly through conscious construction of mis en scene. I don't see that happening in One Battle After Another, but let's just say PTA was ready to include all that, and it meant something to him to put it in the movie; why does he have to make the movie at Warner Bros., where there's really no doubt he would have to downplay the film's left-wing political credentials? If this means something to him, he certainly has other options. The film doesn't have to be made at the scale it was made at, even; if he believes in the subject matter, a more innovative mis en scene derived from production limitations might have helped the film become more artistically pointed and cohesive. And this is part of why I doubt Anderson really has much sympathy for the viewpoint of the French 75 members. He is all too ready to remove their viewpoint, taking away a huge amount of sympathy we might have for people who love, bleed, and die for a vision of the world which might actually move lots of us in the audience. That excision makes the revolutionaries buffoons and poseurs, it disconnects the black members of French 75 from any black revolutionary tradition they might identify with, for instance (we hear Perfidia comes from a "long line of revolutionaries, but her own revolution is dismayingly robbed of a more deep and serious political consciousness by not showing her as able to articulate any of the meanings of her struggle)––and the results are a racist reduction of those black revolutionaries to tropes and sexual fetishization. Making these characters animating ideologies plain turns them from superficial characters in ones with more depth, but the creative choice has been made to avoid doing that, for whatever reason.

If what I want to see is a different film, I would say that's the approach of any critic; I want to see a better film, with better ideas in it, with more understanding of the world included in the experience. The filmmakers' unwillingness to place the revolutionaries within the context of their animating ideas––to instead hedge around them with political positions palatable to pretty much everybody but the far right, to avoid showing in any way that the French 75 have theory and criticism and beliefs outside of the mainstream which animate and inform the way their actions are outside of the mainstream––withers the characters and their world, makes them seem insubstantial. I'm not saying I want a doctrinaire discussion in the middle of the movie; but the milieu of the revolutionaries could and should have felt more authentic than it does, more freighted with their character motivations. A filmmaker as skilled as PTA has done this before––specifically in Boogie Nights, where we understand in casual ways throughout the picture how the various members of the film unit view the world they're in. So it wasn't impossible to execute, if PTA had wanted to do it. But nothing in the film shows me he understands these revolutionaries as they understand themselves, and I think it's a tremendous blind spot that makes the movie racist, makes it intellectually unsatisfying, and makes––for me––an ever-increasingly disappointing viewing experience. If what PTA wanted to do with the film was poke gentle fun at the "gang who couldn't shoot straight" shenanigans of the revolutionaries, caricature the white power racists in broad ways, and make a sort of action comedy of the whole thing, I would say he does that; but I'm disappointed that's the level at which he thought was appropriate to engage this subject matter. At a time like this it feels more pressing than ever not to be a complacent centrist, and it seems in especially bad form if you have that sort of outlook to make a movie about these revolutionaries and what they inspire and not include any of the animating beliefs that draw them to their cause. And here I'd say that the idea of the revolution being in safe hands with the next generation is just the kind of centrist thinking the film seems to be grounded in––the kind of thinking that diminishes the film's view of black revolutionaries especially, the kind of thinking that makes it feel to the filmmakers like they don't need to actually understand what these people believe that has drawn them together. And for me it's too reductive to admire.

[therewillbeblus]

The ratting is an interesting question I don’t quite get either, though

Spoiler

doesn’t Regina Hall break the cycle at the end of the film?

Spoiler

Yes, but she claims she would tell them where Bob is if she knew, which she doesn’t, in order to save Willa. Which I think would be a noble cause and break the ‘save yourself’ ratting pattern - she would only do it to save the future, the innocent, the hope.

[Mr Sausage]

I saw the movie when it came out and thought it was fine. Not especially compelling or memorable, but it held my attention. So what follows is not a defense of the movie, just an account of what I see as its politics:

The ideology of the French 75 is taken for granted. You can infer their basic positions from their boilerplate leftist revolutionary actions and the people they oppose. Aside from that, no specifics are offered. But there is an implicit critique of the group in their name. The French revolution notoriously turned almost immediately into a murderous authoritarian state and then into an empire with an imperialist emperor. Perfidia exemplifies this critique, in that her revolutionary zeal is powered by an unacknowledged zest for psychosexual games of power and control. As she screams even in the trailer: "Bitch, I feel like Tony Montana." A weird reference for a leftist revolutionary, this capitalist symbol of masculine dominance and lust for power. But this shadow in Perfidia doesn't go unacknowledged. Regina Hall's Deandra, the moral centre of the French 75, is often photographed looking warily and worriedly at Perfidia in such moments, even at one point sharing a pointed look with Bob across a campfire as Perfidia carries on. The group is fatally infected by the very thing it sought to oppose, and in the end Perfidia's unthinking lusts breaks it apart entirely (worth noting, too, that despite Junglepussy's name and swagger, she is shocked by Perfidia's unplanned violence in the bank, showing Junglepussy's violent blaxploitation-esque rhetoric and manner was a controlled mask and not her essence as a black revolutionary). So we have a portrait of violent revolutionary groups as fractured from within by unexamined human flaws that mirror the flaws in the very groups they oppose. Not unlike the French or Russian revolutions.

The French 75 are working in the same way as Pynchon's 60s revolutionary and counterculture figures in Vineland and Inherent Vice. The 60s counterculture movements swept people away in a wave of optimism, convinced that whole culture shifts were imminent, even as their methods and aims remained somewhat vague and inchoate. Eventually, those movements lost, as the 60s gave way to Nixon in the 70s (Inherent Vice's setting) and then Reagan in the 80s (Vineland's setting). The United States retrenched into reactionary, authoritarian hegemony. So, too, the French 75, inchoate despite their zeal and successes, failed to prevent a backwards retrenchment into reactionary authoritarianism. The police state won and the revolutionaries fractured from pressures both within and without. Not unlike the 60s counterculture.

But the spirit of 60s defiance does continue to have a galvanizing force even now, and so too does the French 75 in the present day of One Battle After Another. Tho' they fractured and achieved nothing lasting, their rep seems to sustain modern resistance movements. Specifically, Benicio del Toro's Sergio, a man whose form of community resistance is more practical (it vaguely resembles Saul Alinsky's theories of community organization towards action and resistance), better organized, and centred on helping the disenfranchised rather than on violent action. Even the merest connection to the French 75 is enough to get you access to Sergio's considerable pragmatism even when he has a million other things going on. Like the counterculture, the French 75's biggest legacy is not their specific ideology or their actions, but their revolutionary spirit, which continues to speak to modern resistance groups of all stripes. Violent leftist revolution is prey to human frailty and can end up indistinguishable from what it opposed, but revolutionary spirit can be powerful in times where communal resistance is most needed. The French 75 are, in a way, still alive in Sergio and movements like his.

The pulls of the past and the present are exemplified in Willa Ferguson, a mixed race girl caught between the violence and anger of her mother (seen when she too fires a machine gun at the convent) and the controlled, channeled aggression taught her by Sergio's martial arts. Her decision to put aside her aggression and violence, ie. the legacy of her mother, and embrace her father at the end signals her ultimate choice. She ends the movie living happily with Bob but also going out to participate in non-violent demonstrations with her friends, encouraged by a letter from her mother that tasks her with making her own decisions when she is good and ready, ie. the path of traditional maturity over her mother's immature fixations on thrillseeking and sensation. The movie's politics are pretty even keel: resistance, community organization, compassion and brother/sisterhood, but no bombs and guns and battles. Vlaclav Havel over Lenin and Mao.

That someone called the movie a counter-revolutionary psyop is hilarious for a number of reasons, not least of which is that accusations of being a counterrevolutionary were used as a form of oppression post revolution, and symbolize the power of authoritarian regimes. Also, there is no ongoing revolution, and making a leftist film involving revolutionaries is not an application to join a progressive group. The revolutionaries are coopting Anderson so that they can excommunicate him.

The film isn't pro-revolution. It takes a more moderate stance of non-violent resistance and community organization, backed by a blistering critique of rightwing politics as racist, misogynist, and fascist, but also deeply hypocritical in that it fetishizes and wishes to own the very people it hates. So no extreme leftism here. Just embracing a lot of baseline leftist points that most leftists can get behind.

[Mr Sausage]

I'll add something about a number of the critiques feihong has recorded from other sources. The critiques feel like they're coming from an assumption (or a demand) that the movie is itself accomplishing something political. But it's not. The movie is engaging with politics, it's not trying to serve politics. So any claim that it is helping or harming this or that revolution, for me, is totally beside the point. It's a work of art, not a piece of agitprop. It's engaging in a dialogue with political ideas, but it is not itself a piece of politics.

Art can be political without serving the political. This is a distinction that many today have forgotten.

[Drucker]

But in fact Bob seems much more like a stoned, Gen X slacker, because we never know what, if anything, he really believes in.

I mean, I think this is accurate, no? Bob is a hero of the revolution by dint of being there, but I thought that the film makes fairly clear it may not be an honor he necessarily deserves. In the opening scene he sort of springs out of nowhere, and it almost seems like he is running late to the revolution. There's obviously some romantic interest between him and the "true" revolutionary, Perfidia, but we quickly learn we cannot trust her romantic instincts. If anything he seems to luck his way into a relationship where he is punching way above his romantic weight. His mother-in-law reminds him of this, quite explicitly. And when their child is born, he is eager to give up the revolution and settle down into domestic life. Of course Bob's beliefs and values as insufficiently clear or dedicated to the cause, he kind of is a gen-X slacker type!

I wouldn't personally put much stock in Brianna Joy's (or any left wing podcaster's, even the ones I like) criticism of art. It more often than not seems to boil down to "the film doesn't say explicitly what I want it to say." This film is about a million times better, than say, Judas And The Black Messiah.

[knives]

It’s a bit like the meme of the internet poster complaining that Black Panther is bad because at no point did he address the audience in support of the kind of socialism I prefer.

[MichaelB]

It’s a bit like the meme of the internet poster complaining that Black Panther is bad because at no point did he address the audience in support of the kind of socialism I prefer.

There's a splendid review of Crawl that complains that it didn't shoehorn in a finger-wagging environmental message. (I may have added the phrase "finger-wagging".)

Crawl, for those who may have forgotten, is a splendidly lean'n'mean alligator-themed monster movie whose 87-minute running time is one of its most appealing features. In fact, I'd happily have cut it to 80 by getting rid of the tedious formerly estranged father-daughter bonding, but it definitely didn't need any kind of virtue-signalling Important Message.